I'VE GOT MY OWN IDEAS ABOUT THE RIGHTEOUS KICK: A couple lightly-sketched points about the exchanges between Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan on marriage, in which my Busted Halo interview was quoted and discussed. I've only read the one post of Sullivan's, so if he has already replied to the points made below, I apologize and would love to be pointed to the relevant posts--I've been out of town and he posts so much that I have a hard time keeping up!

1. Sullivan argues that in order to accept my or Douthat's understanding of marriage, you have to accept the entirety of Catholic teaching on sexuality, and therefore our opposition to gay marriage is narrowly sectarian and unavailable to those who don't share our entire set of religious beliefs.

I disagree! I mean, I get that both the New York Times and Busted Halo juxtaposed my beliefs about God and my beliefs about marriage. That was their framing. It has never been mine. When I actually lay out my own beliefs about marriage, I don't use religious language. While I'm skeptical that any moral claim can be made in entirely secular terms all the way down--in other words, eventually you do have to discuss your fundamental metaphysical beliefs and deepest loves/loyalties--I think the case against gay marriage is about as secular as the cases against, say, torture or the death penalty. In other words, I think we can talk for a while before you get to God, and that's what I try to do. (Similarly, when I talk about being gay and Catholic, I try to open up some space in the discussion for people who are themselves celibate for religious reasons but nonetheless support gay marriage.)

Sullivan really can't just assert that my argument can only be accepted by those who accept the entirety of Catholic sexual morality. He has to offer an argument or evidence to that effect, beyond the argument ad celibatem.

A clunky postscript: Obviously, I also disagree with the idea that Catholic celibacy requires people like me to "cease to exist, really, as sexual beings," but you all know that already because I am constantly saying it! But that really is a sectarian discussion, so bracket it, me lads, bracket it....

2. Sullivan and I may have more common ground than he realizes. I do think we need to find some way of acknowledging and even honoring the good work done by gay couples in supporting one another and the children many of them are raising. I do not think that cultural project requires pretending that men and women, or gay and lesbian and heterosexual relationships, are fungible. I certainly do not think that cultural project requires pretending that only bigots think gay relationships aren't the same as marriage, or that only retrograde Vatican lackeys think that gay activists should not attempt to remove sex difference from our understanding of marriage and the cultural norms surrounding marriage.

And so what's interesting to me about Sullivan's post is that he agrees that the future is really wide open and we don't know what comes next. Neither he nor I has a really super clear, ten-point plan for how our society can do better at supporting all families without pretending that two men are the same as a man and a woman or two women. So I wonder why he is so adamant that while norms of monogamy may or may not shift in various complex ways, any legitimate future must include gay marriage. Why is that the (one?) non-negotiable?

I know my position raises more questions than it answers. So does Sullivan's! (And mine has, you know, millennia of art, popular songs, philosophy and yes, theology and liturgy behind it. But who's counting?)

I have no idea how much of this particular post Douthat might agree with. But with any luck it will at least open up a bit of space in the dialogue. I thought Douthat's Times op-ed was really good given the length restrictions, a refreshing break from the stale repetition and uncharitable misreading which characterizes much of the gay-marriage debate, and I'm encouraged by the openness with which Sullivan engaged with him. More please!

More on gay marriage, gay people, and the Church tomorrow.

DEAL OR NO DEAL: Just finished The Second Mark, Joy Goodwin's terrific book ostensibly about the Salt Lake City Olympics pairs skating scandal. Its actual subjects include, among many other things, the rocky transition from the Soviet Union to the "new Russia"; a brief history of modern China, as told by small children in a cold climate; the ways culture and politics affect our aesthetic judgments; the messiness of skating judging at the best of times; and the ways--good, bad, and very much both at once--in which women understand, accept, and adjust to suffering.

All of this in fluid and unobtrusive prose. I checked it out of the library because it promised background on Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao, the Chinese pairs champions, but I'd recommend it even to people with no especial interest in figure skating. (But if you want to know why Shen and Zhao are so great, try this, this, and this!)

Camp is to my mind extremely valuable as a specifically queer mode of expression, a potentially subversive mode of humor but also a backhanded mode of worship. Camp is not the same as parody. Even Susan Sontag, in her famous essay on the subject, recognized in camp a paradoxically genuine devotion for the institution that is ostensibly ridiculed. Just as drag queens adore the tragic divas that they travesty, so ecclesiastical camp springs to the defense of the one true Church.
--Decadence and Catholicism

WHO KNEW THE SUBSPECIES THEME WAS SO GREAT? A very fun collection of horror soundtracks and clips, via Fascination with Fear.

And Arbogast on Film does that "Images of Film" thing: shadowplay. Awesome.

JESUS CAMP: So, a few scattered thoughts on Decadence and Catholicism, now that I've finally finished it.

If you're interested in its subject, you should read it! I enjoyed Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture more, partly b/c Roden quotes more than Hanson does and therefore gets out of the way more, and partly b/c I just think e.g. Gerard Hopkins and Eliza Kearney are more talented than John Gray and--yeah, I'll say it--Verlaine. Although I do want to read Ronald Firbank now. Anyway yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in this book.

It does have its deficiencies. Hanson is often overly abstract for my taste. Quote more, bubbitz less. I disagree with some of his interpretations of Wilde's work, and think he's being overly defensive in response to (what I agree are) overly Catholic-apologetic readings of Wilde.

Hanson sometimes writes like two specific kinds of undergraduate: the Objectivist who thinks people only ever act out of self-interest (in Hanson's case, "pleasure"), and the *~*edgy*~* pomo for whom pursuit of truth is only interesting if it can be cast as an especially complex form of lying. Both of those stances allow Hanson to achieve some real insights, about e.g. the pleasures of shame or sacrifice and the ways in which confessions can serve to conceal the self as much as reveal it, but when he gets too insistent I find I have limited patience. If shame is only another shade of self-indulgence then personal choice and pleasure are valorized to an extent I find banal. ...Also, the epilogue is intermittently petulant. I'm sorry John Paul II was more popular than you.

But I didn't expect an orthodox perspective when I opened this book, so really, I got exactly what I came for, and I'm grateful for that. Again, if you're interested in the decadents or in the erotics of Catholicism, you should read this.

To be 1890 in 1890 might be considered almost normal. To be 1890 in 1922 might be considered almost queer.
--Carl Van Vechten, quoted in Decadence and Catholicism

"KUMARI LOVES A MONSTER: A romantic picture book of young girls who have fallen in love with monsters." I especially like the sample page with the housework.

And if you'd like a soundtrack, Sesame Street has you covered!

Although the remark is witty and ironic, Wilde recognized the potential of beautiful performative acts, such as taking Communion, to determine the imaginative framework through which the world is perceived.
--Decadence and Catholicism

I like this b/c it reminds me of "The Snow Queen," with the glass in Kay's eye. (Want to know what the "remark" was? Read the book!)

THIRD VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST: In which I am interviewed about Gay Catholic Whatnot. This is a two-page condensation of a phone interview which I remember as being almost two hours long, so it sort of jolts around a lot; also, for "intimate" read "infinite"! (Freudian slip?) You might check out the "outtakes" as well. The interviewer was really good at persistently tracking me to my lair and making me justify my assertions, although again, you don't necessarily get the full force of that because of the length constraints.

IMAGES OF FILM: DARKNESS.

EVERY DAY IS SELF-PARODY DAY. So far in Decadence and Catholicism we have had three, count 'em three, figure skaters! Two young men for whom various people conceived homoerotic passions, and also Huysmans's hagiography of St. Lydwina, skating's patroness. I don't even know anymore. My life is just a series of bad rhymes at this point.

Through its incitement to androgyny and to the performance of gender roles presumed to be inappropriate to one's anatomical sex, inversion is also figured [in Huysmans] as a subversion of nature in favor of text.
--Decadence and Catholicism

Interesting in itself; and also, forcing a separation of nature and text in this way seems to me to be the opposite approach from e.g. the theology of the body/"language of the body" approach. See also here.

In the nineteenth century, an era steeped in the language of religious and Platonic eros, two men or--even less suspiciously--two women could sustain such a sexually ambiguous relationship with impunity. They might even regard the relationship as more intense because more pure, so to speak. Thus we find Edmond Lepelletier pointing to Letinois as evidence of Verlaine's elevated affection for other men, rather than of his homosexuality. He even tries to desexualize Verlaine's love for Rimbaud, but with no great persuasiveness. Modern biographers, however, are loath to believe that such a homosexual desire can exist happily, and this disbelief strikes me as homophobic. Even today, the figure of the homosexual is so saturated with sexuality in the popular imagination that the very possibility of religious faith or chaste devotion in gay men is held to be highly improbable. Like everyone else, homosexuals eroticize religion, eroticize fatherhood, eroticize friendship, and eroticize aesthetics, but only through the utmost discretion are they allowed to get away with it. Gay men as a rule are not permitted to sublimate.
--Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, yes I'm finally reading it

WHY WE LISTEN TO SAD MUSIC WHEN WE'RE SAD:

...It's counterintuitive, but Johnson's story suggests that the desolation in Schostakovich's music, resonating with the desolation in their hearts, served to bolster the spirits of the Russian populace at the time. The premise postulated by Johnson and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who co-hosted the event, is the oft-repeated idea that music, by conferring a narrative structure to emotion, brings emotion closer to thought. "There is something about seeing your own mood reflected that allows you to let go of that feeling," says Johnson.

But it is not so simple. As Tallis, who was standing in for an absent Robert Winston, pointed out at the start of the evening's conversation, there is a complex interplay between the emotion the composer attempts to write into the music, that conveyed by the music, the listener's interpretation, and the listener's mood. This was resoundingly reflected in the results of an experiment carried out on the evening's audience.

more (via the Rattus)

"HEIDEGGER'S INVOLVEMENT IN POLITICS IS VERY REGRETTABLE." Ratty's right; you must watch this. (Tons of cussin' so be forewarned.)

DECADENCE AND THE A.M.E. CHURCH: A few thoughts, not a review, about Passing Strange. It's the story of a young black man from LA who seeks himself, or meaning, or something, through Amsterdam and West Berlin and finally home. ETA: It's at the Studio Theater through August 8.

1. I loved this! I loved it well beyond reason. I loved it in part because it really connected with the audience Friday night. I get that it's easy to be cynical about whitefolk toe-tappin' at musicals about black identity. But that isn't what happened here. What happened was more like when I went to see Marlon Riggs's film Black Is/Black Ain't, and at the end credits we heard the opening strains of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"... and the whole theater, black and white and read all over, started to sing.

If this city is your heart then this play will take you home.

2. The insistent decadent aesthetic was amazing! I don't know if I've ever seen such a complete assimilation of decadence to the American experience, which is so often presented as sincerist, outside a specifically gay narrative... with one exception. The fact that the exception is Invisible Man should tell you how thrilled I was by the way this play and this production negotiated the ways in which masks melt into the skin, culture can but can't be rejected (one of the characters makes the point I made somewhat idiotically here!), and America is an absent but inescapable parent.

I loved that even the complacency and hypocrisy of the mainstream black church was presented as a possible vehicle for becoming "real." It didn't work for the narrator, but I genuinely didn't feel like the play blamed Mr. Franklin (the PK, who uh... maybe I think plays the organ, if you see what I'm sayin' here) for being a halfway house rather than a home for the narrator. There was just a lot of generosity in this script. Everyone's masks were honored even though the show also acknowledged the genuine poignancy and power of the rhetoric of "realism."

It's really fascinating to compare this play to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, which I also saw at the Studio. Christianity is a named thing here, a live option in a certain sense, which it never is for Stoppard's characters. And yet the specific form of Christianity is kind of intriguing: Words like identity, meaning, and love are very much central to the Christian possibility, but words like sin, grace, redemption, forgiveness, and salvation are totally absent. That's in no way a criticism of the show! I mean it says so much and works so well.

3. Oh Lord, the pastiches were so perfect! This is a musical, so yeah okay it gets sentimental in the end. But before then, the pastiches of bougie church life ("Baptist Fashion Show") and '79/'82 punk (wow I don't even know which song this was, but the lyrics "I'm a business motherfucker" probably help you remember it!) and '80s West German punk style are just so loving and forgiving.

4. Rock 'n' Roll is much more cross-generational than this play. There is no next generation here. There is no pregnancy, no child, no humiliation as our own rebellions are deployed against what we really do think is now our greater wisdom as adults! There's no need to show what it feels like to grow up.

And yet unchosen obligation is still the throbbing heart of this show. When it gets sentimental, which believe me, it jumps into with all its musical-theater gross Grizabella make-it-cute heart... even so it's at least sentimental about unchosen loves. In fact, the play is adamant that the most blunt forces in love are most powerful, love without understanding, mother and son beyond any kind of intellectual or even intelligible connection. She is his and at last he is hers and and no one can tell anybody why. Motherhood is handcuffs locked on both ends. (There's no mention of the protagonist's father. I honestly didn't notice this until at least the intermission, even though it's my actual job. I think that speaks to a level of realism in the play itself; it isn't playing to the skybox.)

But yeah, I kind of missed the depiction of what might happen to this guy, with his complex relationship with unchosen obligations in general and parenthood in particular, if he became a parent. Why is this play so contracepted? Aren't there more interesting stories to be told in the unchosen future?

ONE GOD, THREE OPINIONS: OK, unsurprisingly it looks like I can't get the more reviewy version of my take on The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza published for money before the play's run ends. But my wallet's loss is your wallet's... also loss, since I cannot let you guys go without telling you why you have to see this terrific play!!!

It's showing at the DC Jewish Community Center until July 25 and seriously, people, I can't tell you. If you like this blog and you live in the area, eat some ramen so you can afford this play.

Here you can find my somewhat more personal and somewhat less reviewy take on the play. I just loved it. Y'all, if you see it, link me to your thoughts and reviews!

(As always, Blogger is adding an extra "tail" to my posts, so be sure to use this link and not whatever happens if you just go to my main secondary site.)

IT'S ALL IN THE WRISTS. If you want to know what I mean when I use the phrase "la nouvelle Heloise," here's a visual aid. An icon of submission as command, that Mobius strip of self-possession I described in my Inside Catholic column on Abelard and Heloise.

If it were any more real, it'd be fictional.
--Passing Strange (now at the Studio Theater!), Stew and Heidi Rodewald; the line recurs but it's always earned

IF I COULD WALK THAT WAY I WOULDN'T NEED BATTERIES! Via John Carney, I Write Like....

My "Contemporary Christian Music" post garnered an "I Write Like HP Lovecraft."

"Romoeroticism": I Write Like Dan Brown (!!!!!).

The first page or so of New Wineskins: I Write Like David Foster Wallace.

And an unpublished (so far) review of that Spinoza play: I Write Like James Joyce.

There is no humility without humiliation, people.

"THE EXAMINED LIFE BEHIND BARS."

THEY ALL WANT LITTLE PIECES OF THIS YEAR'S GIRL: Over at the blog where I post stuff which is too long or spoilery for here, I've posted a ridiculously long thing about lesbianisms and why I was way too quick to talk as if every girl's experience was like mine. Toward the end there's some language which is a bit more explicit than what I want to have on the blog, as well. But overall the main point here is that I really, really needed to be more open to the fact that my experience is not The One Universal Lesbian Experience (In HD!) and I hope people whose experiences and interpretations of those experiences are radically different from mine will still write in to me.

THE CREATION OF A PRIVATE LANGUAGE is also, of course, an important way in which tradition functions to make an institution more like a person, and an individual's acceptance of an abstracted, often difficult or subordinate, role more like a specific relationship of love between two people.

"WHY ARE YOU STANDING OUT HERE IN THE COLD?" A lovely little confection. I note that Ratty and I have a bunch of these... although the only ones I can think of right now are based on people thinking I'm stupid!

Link via the Rattus.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: GENERAL JINJUR. Postscript since I forgot to write about this in the sorrel/beets post. I already told you all about learning to make crispy baked wontons. Last week I went absolutely crazy for them! I seriously could eat these things three meals a day.

This time I filled all the wontons with the same stuff: chopped button mushrooms from the store (the Mushroom People at my farmer's market weren't in town, whimper, but otoh this is a great recipe to use up cheaper 'shrooms), chopped garlic, a bit of dried rosemary, cream cheese, s&p, and fresh ginger. Fold up, rub w/olive oil, bake in oven for maybe 8 minutes at 375 (until mostly golden, with some crispy and blistery bits), tell yourself that this time you will wait until they're cool enough to eat, plant your face in them anyway and burn the roof of your mouth again.

These were fantastic, incredibly easy (they sound fussy but aren't, at all, and you can make them in big batches assembly-line style), and the ultimate snack-turned-meal. I would replace popcorn for movies with these. Also, if you cover the leftover wrappers carefully they won't dry out so fast; I got about three days from this package with virtually no waste, eating about 16 wontons a day. (Sixteen was the number which fit onto my baking tray, four rows of four.)

I'd hoped to make dessert wontons filled with chopped strawberry, cream cheese, dried rosemary and cinnamon, but that didn't work out. I'll try it later though!

More Gay Catholic Whatnot posting later, maybe not tonight but very soon. Plus whatever else shambles over the transom....

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: OH, BLENDER, WON'T YOU HELP A FIRST OFFENDER? Two things I've eaten recently.

Sorrel thing: The idea here was to make a sorrel soup, but that didn't really work. I think as a condiment, for example a sauce for chicken or (in a smaller quantity) salmon, this might be perfect. On its own it was thick and, more importantly, unbalanced: too tangy.

Anyway, I chopped up a bunch of fresh sorrel, a small tomato, and maybe three medium cloves of garlic. I blended that with sour cream and (if memory serves) cumin and fresh tarragon, and maybe a small amount of dried rosemary. Then I cooked, salted, and ground some black and white pepper over it.

To do this as a soup I would substitute heavy cream for the sour cream. I think that would balance the tangy sorrel. This was tasty but not quite on-target.

Beet thing: Vastly more labor- and time-intensive, but also much better!

I set the oven for 375, peeled two small beets and one large, quartered the small beets and cut the big one into chunks of that size. I foiled a baking tray, put the beet chunks on it, and rubbed them with olive oil. They went in the oven for a guesswork amount of time, maybe 20 mins? Your oven will vary since mine is old and cantankerous. Meanwhile I chopped two medium cloves of garlic and a big chunk of jalapeno, and got them a bit past golden-brown (that was an accident--I was aiming for golden--but it didn't mess up the flavor at all) in a saucepan w/a bit more olive oil.

I pulled the beets out of the oven. The chunks which were already tender (easily sliced w/a dull knife) came out onto the cutting board; the ones which were still hard got cut into smaller pieces and went back in the oven. While the harder pieces were finishing I did a fine-ish chop on the softer pieces. Then finished chopping the remaining beets. The beets went into the saucepan with cumin and salt, and I covered all of that with water. I brought it to a boil, then turned it down to medium heat and simmered it. I experimented with cover-on or cover-off cooking and ultimately, I think, overestimated how much of the water I wanted to cook off, but that didn't affect the taste.

Then I blended the beet mixture, returned it very briefly to the heat just to make sure it was nice and hot, and scraped it into a bowl. It was a mash, not a soup, really. A bunch of dollops of sour cream went on top, and then some fresh tarragon and lots of freshly-ground black and white pepper.

This is sooooooooo good! I'm eating it now. The jalapeno is noticeable but not at all assertive, and the garlic is mild but welcome. The cumin is delicious. The tarragon seemed too strong at first bite, but as it started to cook a bit in the heat of the dish, or maybe as it blended in more with the other ingredients, it started to really "play well" with the pepper. And of course beets and sour cream are a classic combination. This is a super beety dish which isn't at all overwhelming; it's balanced. I'm really happy with it. The only issues, as I noted, are that this is a LOT of work and time for a lunch dish.

"HERE IS WHAT I THINK OF YOUR PLAN."

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF BEINGCAKES. Whoa. I was pacing anxiously just now and thought to myself, "Have I spent the past ten years obsessively arguing that language is the house of being, and that every attempt to understand that phrase without a Jewish or Christian theological grounding ends up in Heidegger's Rektoratsrede?"

This is what I think about after watching a lot of late '80s men's figure skating, apparently. The majestic hair must do something to my brain.

"I did study with Strauss, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm a Straussian. I haven't said I'm a Straussian."

Although its roots are traced back to the ancient world of mythology, the real birth of figure skating occurred in Stuart England.
--James R. Hines, Figure Skating: A History

Oh LOL, of course I would fall for the Restoration-era sport! ...And the one whose motto seems to be, "Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls."

(edited to fix quote and tags)

"HE RIGGED UP HIS WHISK TO HIS DRILL."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHNNY WEIR. Here, have a planet.

(Do I have any readers who love figure skating? I haven't been posting about it because I have nothing to say other than things like, "Look, another amazing performance from Lucinda Ruh! Is she part-orchid or what?", and similarly unprofessional flailing for various other skaters. But why not email me about your favorite programs etc? I'll post links if you've got 'em.)

Valkenburgh: You spoke about philosophy with a simple girl? About what Plato thinks and what Aristotle thinks?

Spinoza: No, about what I think and what she thinks. Plato and Aristotle? You start listening to them and before you know it you're believing in rabbits out of hats, or the Virgin Birth!
--David Ives, The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch Spinoza

Lines from memory, almost certainly wrong in several places, and I admit they come across as a bit on-the-nose on the page like that. But a) obviously you know why I had to quote this, given my own trajectory! and b) the lines totally work onstage, in Theater J's fantastic, standing-ovation-worthy production. GO SEE THIS NOW. More soon.

THE THREE MOST BEAUTIFUL WORDS. I note that Captain Kirk's version would also work!

DISCO PURGATORIO: I have finally listened to all of Janelle Monáe's Metropolis: The Chase Suite, and I can tell you what I was pretty sure I'd tell you: You need this. Monáe is an opera-trained lady nerd who's created an amazing pop album centered on the story of an enslaved android who falls for a human, endangering both their lives.

"Many Moons" is still the standout, unstoppable song. You can get a taste of the song, with amazing video, here; the album version is actually better, believe it or not. But "Cybertronic Purgatory" is beautiful and haunting, and in general, Monáe's versatility of style makes this album a unique history of the past fifty years. ("Smile" I like mostly for the quick Elvis "thank yuh" at the end, but that gesture retroactively reshapes the whole song, makes it even sadder and even more obviously an attempt at reclamation of and reconciliation with the American past.)

"Mr. President" is a classic of retrofuturism, as if the 1970s had time-traveled into the Obama administration. I'm not sure it succeeds as a song, rather than a document, but Lord how it made me ache--and ache, also, for Obama himself, who is called upon to be "Moses" and who is generally treated, here, like a Shakespearean king and not an American president.

Anyway, I'm about to order the new album, "Archandroid," about which I've heard nothing but good. "Metropolis" is an amazing reinterpretation of more or less everything I love, Metropolis itself crossed with Invisible Man (the Ellison one) crossed with BET's Gospel programming. Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler and Q107, Washington's Top 40!... and the black man at Union Station with the saxophone, playing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC: In which I ramble about three adaptations of, respectively, "The Little Match Girl"; Revelation; and the Gospel of Luke.

First, a disclaimer which is actually an apology: I know nothing about this kind of music whatsoever. I have no vocabulary for it. I will be throwing out random analogies and metaphors and people who actually know what they're talking about here will probably laugh until they cry. On the other hand, that means that if you are also not well-versed in this kind of music (what is it even called? It comes up on iTunes as "classical" but that seems silly) maybe this post will give a sense of whether you might like these discs!

David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion (and some other things). The difficulty with adapting this story, I think, is that when you're reading it in the solitude of your skull it's easy for the sublimity of the tale, the fever-dream intensity, to shiver into your consciousness. But music makes it somehow public and touchable in a way which my instinct says might emphasize the sentimentality which is also a real part of the story. I'm still not convinced that Lang works against the sentimentality enough (and there's one very on-the-nose use of bells which I found distracting), but a second listen convinced me that there's more cold rapture in this music than I'd thought at first.

Lang opens very strong, with a haunting chorus of overlapping voices calling, "Come, daughter," chilly and doomy. Then he begins to alternate between clipped, precise storytelling ("It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the year") and a sort of penitents' chorus which offers aching soliloquies from the point of view of someone watching, or remembering watching, the little girl's suffering. I still think that some of the girl's visions and stations of the cross could be given a greater edge of hysteria, a greater sense of the music spiraling out of control. But overall this is a really memorable and poignant piece of music. I'd play it for kids who like Andersen as well as adults.

The other, short pieces on this disc (an adaptation of the Song of Songs, a Yiddish folk song, a riff on Genesis, and a sort of paraphrase of Ecclesiastes) didn't move me, but might work better for you. I still felt like there was too much control here, too much deliberate, intellectual, maybe even self-consciously poignant pacing.

Phil Kline, John the Revelator. It's wild to listen to this right after The Little Match Girl Passion, because the rhythm and emotion of the music is so different! We open with a terrific hymn or marching song--I really don't think it's just the "Glory, hallelujah!" chorus which put me in mind of Civil War songs--and from then on we alternate between relatively straightforward adaptations of the Mass in Latin, and deeply shaken, crisis-and-rapture songs in English. I loved "Alone" and "The Unnamable," and also the take on "What Wondrous Love Is This?" which closes the disc. This is a fierce, tough piece of work which offers its broken heart up on a platter.

Krzyzstof Penderecki, St. Luke Passion. This one might be the hardest for me to talk about, in part because the parts which strike me and how they strike me keep changing. (I've listened to it three times in the past two days.) One thing I really love is how it captures so intensely three of the sharply-contrasting moods of an actual Palm Sunday or Holy Week Mass: the matter-of-fact statements of what went down; the scuttling, hissing chatter of the crowd, who can only agree and come together when they're baying for Christ's blood; and the agony and isolation of Christ.

The first time I listened to this, I remember thinking somewhere around maybe "Deus meus" that Penderecki really does convey the hysteria, alienation, the horror of the Passion narrative. "This music sounds the way Carnival of Souls looks," I remember thinking. I haven't had quite that reaction the other two times, but each time I've found something else which worked. The pacing really helps here, as you're taken very naturally from one of the three moods to another, never quite allowed to settle in and get comfortable with any one way of relating to the music and story. And the setting of "Into your hands I commend my spirit" shakes me every time.

...And now, having exhausted the possibilities of the present, I'm listening to the Essential Tallis Scholars, which I cannot recommend highly enough!

IT'S THE FEAST OF ST. JOSEPH CAFASSO, patron of prisoners and those condemned to death.

"A GREAT RECKONING IN A LITTLE ROOM": My Inside Catholic column, on confession.

BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM: A fascinating story of Islam, liquor stores, and getting fresh produce to "food deserts." Via Get Religion, from whose worthwhile comments box I stole the post title.

"THE END OF THE BEST FRIEND": I cannot possibly improve on Ratty's comment.

(Also, while I obviously support strong and not anti-love efforts to reduce bullying, aren't weird or socially-isolated children the ones who often rely most on their best friends rather than a large and intimidating social group? But mostly yeah, what she said.)

TOO MUCH IS NEVER ENOUGH. Here I am with Ann Althouse talking about gay Catholic whatnot and jurisprudence and my many random opinions. I babble like a really ridiculous brook and also you get lots of hilarious shots of my hair. I have a lot of hair. I was very grateful for the opportunity! but I feel duty-bound to note that I don't think I said anything I haven't said on the blog already.

ORDER FROM CONFUSION SPRUNG: As promised, some thoughts on the problems with the "intrinsically disordered" jargon the Church currently uses to describe homosexuality.

I want to open by saying that the Catholic Church speaks a lot of languages. I have a really hard time with natural-law talk, for example, and also with Carmelite spirituality, even though both of those are really different! Whereas I respond really strongly to "theology of the body" and, to a certain extent, Christian neo-Platonism. But the great thing about the Church is that you do not have to buy in to any one particular vocabulary.

The fact that the Church currently uses a certain way of talking about gay people (and, for that matter, the fact that "gay identity" as such is just over a century old--that doesn't make it fake, it just makes it one way among many of talking about same-sex desire) doesn't mean that you need to buy the vocabulary in order to live out the teaching. If the way the Church talks gets in the way of your chastity, ignore it. (Or I guess I should say, try to find and develop other ways of talking about gay life; but reworking the Church's language might not be part of your vocation, in which case I think ignoring the language while living by the teaching is the best way to operate.) Your chastity and your unstinting fidelity to Christ are so much bigger and more beautiful than any one theological framework. So yeah, don't have gay sex; but you can think about that sacrifice and challenge in a whole lot of different ways, including ways which might shock your local priest.

Having said that, here's my problem with the "intrinsically disordered" language: I think it relies on a mechanistic understanding of eros. If sexual desire can be easily tweezed away from nonsexual longing and love and adoration then yeah, sure, I guess I can see the point of calling homosexual desire "disordered." But that's not how eros actually works! My lesbianism is part of why I form the friendships I form. It's part of why I volunteer at a pregnancy center. Not because I'm attracted to the women I counsel, but because my connection to other women does have an adoring and erotic component, and I wanted to find a way to express that connection through works of mercy. My lesbianism is part of why I love the authors I love. It's inextricable from who I am and how I live in the world. Therefore I can't help but think it's inextricable from my vocation.

And what's funny is that even the defenders of the "intrinsically disordered" language are defending so little. Basically all of them say one of two things: either "everything you do which is influenced by your lesbianism is tainted," which is bleakly hilarious if you've ever nursed a sick woman through her illness in part because you loved and were attracted to her; or "it just means that your eros can never be acted on, whereas even wrongly-directed heterosexual eros might be in some hypothetical made-up world." Which is like... do we really want to be encouraging unhappily-married heteros to think, "I could totally act on this desire and it would be ordered!... you know, if the old ball-and-chain died, or we got an annulment"? I mean, at that point literally nothing is added by the "explanatory" language of disorder which wasn't already stated by the bare moral teaching: You don't get to have sex with ladies, case closed. I knew that already! What extra work is this jargon doing? It doesn't even make straight people feel superior, since none of them know or think about it unless their kids are gay.

I am a lot more tentative about proposing alternate ways of understanding Catholic moral teaching on sexuality, alternate vocabularies. I think this post, where I describe what lesbianism feels like to me, might be a starting point.

I genuinely believe that eros requires that the focus of our desire be Other in some important way. And so the process by which homosexual desire transforms members of one's own sex into Other--the process by which pretty girls become iconic women, and therefore available for me as focus points of my eros--is fascinating to me, and I think it's genuinely sublime. That said, I don't think it's too hard to do the math on "eros is directed toward the Other + sex difference, la difference, is the fundamental difference in human nature = homosexuality requires an alienation from self, from eros, or from the beloved, so that likeness can begin to seem Other when in fact it is not."

I'm not sure yet if that's how I want to talk about Catholic theology of sex. But I do think we can all try to work through what being gay feels like, and thereby come up with a vastly broader and better set of vocabularies than the ridiculously, painfully limited set the Church is working with right now.

One final note, which is maybe bitchy but I don't know a better way to do this: Please don't use the Church's current failures and lacunae and flinching uncourtesy as an excuse to wallow in self-pity. Yes, the "intrinsically disordered" language sucks and is a mark of privilege, the kind of thing you only say if you don't feel it yourself or don't care about the other people who feel it. But if you focus on the failures of the Church's language, not only do you lose the opportunity (which, again, may not be your vocation) to improve that language, but you also lose out on everything else the Church offers. Self-pity is I think the least Christian emotion in the history of ever, and it's worth thinking hard about whether and to what extent and where your problems with the Church are really problems with the way the Church hierarchs express themselves right now. In which case, prayers to Joan of Arc would seem to be in order.

And in general, if you have to entertain negative emotions toward the Church (and God knows I do), I highly recommend bitchy and bitter over self-pitying comfort. That's my considered aesthetic judgment and I'll stick to it until you pry my rosary out of my cold, dead hands.

"FIFTEEN TO LIFE": I see someone put my old Crisis magazine piece on fixing the criminal justice system online. This is really not the piece I would write today but I think there are still some good things in it....

But let us proclaim proudly that we are hypocrites, that we will stop at nothing, not even hypocrisy, in our struggle to take control of our lives.
--some manifesto or whatever

I am obviously always going to prefer surrendering control to taking it, and in general I don't think it will be hard for longtime readers to discern which bits of this manifesto I think are self-comforting relativism and which I think are necessary defenses of complicity (see here for a gnomic utterance!). But I liked this line a lot. Better a hypocrite than a heretic.

UPDATERY: Ratty has more on famous authors' texts from last night; and Andrew Sullivan reminds me of the best thing he's ever written!

"HOLDING YES AND NO TOGETHER IN ONE HAND": Here, have a long but (I think) really fruitful discussion between me and the awesome Jendi Reiter. It's about closets and complicity, and Catholics, and it's part of the reason I'm working on a post about why I think the "intrinsically disordered" language the Church currently uses is simplistic and mechanical. I hope to offer alternative ways of talking about and understanding same-sex desire from a faithful Catholic perspective.

“WHAT I LACK IN COMPASSION I MAKE UP FOR IN LACK OF COMPASSION”: So I killed the Rat's weekend by introducing her to Texts from Last Night (warning: addictive and definitely not family-friendly!) and at some point we got onto this thing of attributing some of the texts to well-known authors. (And Alcibiades.) These aren't all perfect matches, but they're fun enough that I'm sharing them.... And be forewarned, this post is no safer for work than the site itself. Cussin', fussin', and backslidin' follow.

Alcibiades:

i wanted to go smoke pot, so i told my mom i was getting tutored. she asked what time i would be back, i told her learning doesn't have a curfew

Jorge Luis Borges:

(323):
You got in a fight last night?
(818):
Yeah! Some dude in the bathroom...he was standing there and I notice he's got the same shirt as me on so I'm like...dude you should have called me, we look like idiots...he didn't say anything...so i got pissed and hit him...completely decimated and my hand was all bloody and covered with glass afterward...weird dude, never saw him again that night or since.
(323):
Um...Did this guy happen to look almost exactly like you?

Miguel de Cervantes:

Assholes at mcdonalds drive through wouldn't serve us last night even though we said we were on small motorcycles that were to small for them to see and weren't heavy enough for the sensors. We made noises and everything.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: He was a controversial figure! I voted for this one:

(971):
I have two black x marks on my hands.
(503):
Yep you got cut off last night after a stripper bent over in front of you and you screamed very loudly 'I can see your soul from here'
(971):
damnit I wish I could remember that.

But Ratty said it wasn't quite right. She votes for this for The Idiot specifically:

why did your cousin post "out tonight" on facebook? doesn't he know it's only 1 in the afternoon?
(1-732):
shhh don't tell him. it's cloudy out and none of his clocks work

and notes that this one echoes a chilling moment from The Brothers Karamazov!:

i am high, trapped with a bunch of skaters and asians watching a cat on lsd on youtube, the girl on the couch next to me is getting fingered, and there is lady gaga playing. god has forgetten about me

more Dostoevsky:

I need to keep friends like you around just in case hell grades on a curve.

and

You know the commpass Jack Sparrow has? The one that just points at whatever you want? Thas pretty much my moral compass.

and especially

I want to tell you about my weekend in person so I can see your look of judgement and disgust.

(Ratty noted: “it's really no wonder we were so into Dostoevsky during our major drinking years”)


Stephen Fry (or possibly Portnoy's Complaint):

just found my diary from when i was 14. i demand a drinking game of this.

This one isn't quite Heloise:

She tied me up with her honor cords...

(Heloise would have made Abelard tie her up with her honor cords.)

O. Henry:

So I went on a date with this girl...and whos our waitress? My girlfriend got a second job she didn't tell me about to afford my bday present.

Florence King (more in her When Sisterhood Was in Flower persona than her Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady one):

All I remember was yelling at him, "Its becasue of people like you that it took us so long to get to the moon!"

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ZOMG:

my desire to fuck abstract ideas (bravery, love, popsicls,,) increases by 8bajillion% when I'm high

This could be anybody! But both Ratty and I thought of Walker Percy first:

I'm not a real person
(586):
I'm sorry, everyone knows that

This one I had a hard time with. It's clearly someone, but neither Angela Carter nor Margaret Atwood are quite right, and I haven't read enough Marilynne Robinson to guess her. So I'm tentatively going with Tom Perrotta:

Id like to know where dora the explorers parents are when she goes on all these crazy ass adventures

The modern Cyrano:

I spent all night sexting your girlfriend for you because you were too drunk. You're welcome.

Philip Roth, The Counterlife:

how's this sound. You, me a box of pink franzia and a night full of possibilities in your basemen. I'll be me. You be you. And we'll see where it goes

and given his line in Sabbath's Theater about “what libraries are for”:

better yet, through the bookshelves. like an intellectual glory hole

and his sexual petulance in general:

And next time, don't pick a fight with me when you're naked. That's just not fair

Jonathan Swift (in the “Celia” poems):

Decided to write a book called "girls don't poop and other myths I wish I still believed in"

I could see Evelyn Waugh doing this in real life:

Hit a parked car with a "property of Jesus Christ" bumper sticker. Wrote out five hail mary's and left it on the windshield.

And this screams I Am Charlotte Simmons:

The girl next to me in class is taking notes on woman's suffrage with a girls gone wild pen.

And as an exercise for my readers: This one has to be someone! But who???

You tried to wear your Jesus costume into Family Christian stores and say it was a book signing.

COMING DISTRACTIONS: Later tonight I'll probably post a very long exchange about coming out, complicity, and resistance; plus also, famous authors' ill-advised text messages. Later this week I hope to have posts about what I mean by gay identity/"gay as a genre," and possibly more on sublimation vs. repression. And, you know, whatever else staggers over the threshold.

Meanwhile, if you're in the DC area I recommend Woolly Mammoth's current show, "Gruesome Playground Injuries." It's very stylized and even gimmicky (it follows two best friends, at five-year intervals arranged out of chronological order, as they become progressively more injured and damaged) but I am always down for highly-stylized narratives as long as the emotions are resonant and real. This is a funny and wrenching play, and Tim Getman is especially good as the risk-taking, accident-prone Doug.

DISPUTED MUTABILITY ON THE DAY OF SILENCE. A hard but necessary read.

...I tried to escape when I could. I joined the art club (even though I don’t have an aesthetic bone in my body!) so that at least one day a week I wouldn’t have to take the bus home. I set up chairs for band practice during recess time so I wouldn’t have to go out with the other kids. I stayed inside whenever I could. When I had to be in public, I tried to make myself disappear, become invisible. I would hide behind the rest of my family when we went out together. I would run from the front door to the car when we left the house, and did the reverse when we came home. I begged to stay home from school at every possible opportunity (in my defense, I did feel genuinely ill all the time thanks to the bullying) and had my wish granted often enough that my report cards were full of complaints about my absenteeism.

But only so much physical escape was possible, so I had to complement it with mental escape. And while I’m embarrassed to be so dramatic, there’s only one way to put it: I died inside. Often days would go by without my ever opening my mouth to speak–I spoke so rarely that my voice felt rusty with disuse when I did. I stopped playing even solitary games. When I got home from school most days I would sit on the floor of my room and just stare into space, opening and closing my fists, hating myself, hating everybody, hating everything, and trying to numb out to get away from all that hatred. And I would do that for hours and hours on end, coming out only when summoned to eat dinner or do chores. ...

I think part of what made the antigay bullying so awful was the way it dovetailed with my family’s and my teachers’ attitudes.

more

MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION AND THE CIA DETAINEES.

DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN THE MAGAZINES? Here, have a list of things which are not true of me!

1. I am "asexual."
2. I have a "low sex drive."
3. I'm a virgin.
4. I was sexually abused, ever.
5. I was raised "without a moral compass."
6. I only like synth pop/disco/the Smiths, and have no time for hard rock or punk.

There. Does that help?

"SHE SHOULD JOIN A SILENT ORDER." My favorite response so far to the NYT article!

"You see, Prince, to be a philanthropist is nice, but not very."
--General Epanchin, in The Idiot

READ MY BOOK FOR MONEY! The one thing I forgot to post last night, which I'd meant to put up once the NYT piece came out, is that I am seeking transgendered readers for a novel. The working title is New Wineskins; the protagonist is FTM, and since I'm not, I really want to make sure the portrayal is resonant and not cliched or harmful. I'm paying standard editing rates of $2/pp, which works out to about $218. I can afford to pay maybe two more readers, so if you or someone you know might be interested, PLEASE email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com and I will email you more details about the novel, as well as answering any questions you might have.

To get a sense of how I think about trans issues, the best place to start is probably my series of posts on Jay Prosser's Second Skins.

And please pass on the word if you think you know someone who might be down for this!

"Listen, Prince, I stayed here last night, first, out of particular respect for the French archbishop Bourdaloue (we kept the corks popping at Lebedev's till three in the morning), but second, and chiefly (I'll cross myself with all the crosses that I'm telling the real truth!), I stayed because I wanted, so to speak, by imparting to you my full, heartfelt confession, to contribute thereby to my own development; with that thought I fell asleep past three, bathed in tears. Now, if you'll believe the noblest of persons: at the very moment that I was falling asleep, sincerely filled with internal and, so to speak, external tears (because in the end I did weep, I remember that!), an infernal thought came to me: 'And finally, after the confession, why don't I borrow some money from him?' Thus I prepared my confession, so to speak, as a sort of 'finesherbes with tears,' to soften my path with these tears, so that you'd get mellow and count me out a hundred and fifty roubles. Isn't that mean, in your opinion?"
--Keller, in The Idiot

IN WHICH I AM PROFILED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES. If you came here from that article, please check out the posts below!

IF MY HEART WERE A HOUSE YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW: More welcome mats for new readers! If you're in the DC area, you might check out the Always Our Children group at St. Matthew's Cathedral. It's named after the US bishops' document for parents of gay children. We have support groups on the second Sunday of every month, from 3.30 to 5.15, usually in the conference room you reach by going down some steps on the left side of the cathedral (not the parking lot side).

The group is pretty awesome, guys. We have people from all points on the broad spectrum of views about Church teaching on sexuality, and we work hard to support one another and find common ground without glossing over differences. Parents (or other family members, or friends) who have questions or struggles around their children's sexual orientation are especially encouraged to come in, but we also do a brisk business in support and discussion and camaraderie for g/l Catholics and fellow travelers.

ASK ME, I WON'T SAY NO, HOW COULD I? Hi there! If you're here from that New York Times piece, you might be interested in my sidebar, where I have a section called "Sicut cervus: Resources on God and homosexuality." All the links there are recommended. I'll point especially to "Romoeroticism" (right on time for Corpus Christi this Sunday, and Pride the weekend after, since sadly they're not in synch this year) and my Commonweal exchange with Luke Timothy Johnson. Here's me vs. the ex-gay movement (and more). Here's me rabbiting on about eros and gay marriage and vocation and whether you'll be gay in Heaven and... other stuff.

I can also be emailed at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com . All emails are confidential unless and until you give me permission to post (with your name, anonymously, or with a pseudonym). I promise to reply to all my emails!

You might also try all the posts tagged "Gay Catholic Whatnot," "marriage," and "romoeroticism."

And here, have a taste of Alan Bray; and my review of his amazing book The Friend.

For more of the madness which is me, try my best-of lists from 2009 and 2008.

FEAST OF ST. JUSTIN MARTYR, patron of philosophers.

AUTOMATIC INSURRECTION, or an online generator for the liner notes to every single album I liked in high school!

I also think "To those who deride the immanent ecstasy in a barricaded hallway or a moment of friendship, we propose nothing less than to reject their homogenous absence, at all costs," sounds like a prompt from a Bruno and Boots fanfiction challenge. Actually a lot of these lines sound like that.

Via WAW4.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: FRITTERS! Inspired by soccas.

ingredients: chickpea flour, water, herbs & spices (in this order: garam masala, cumin, cayenne, cinnamon, rosemary), fresh peas, butter, s&p.

how-to: Mix the flour and spices, then mix w/enough water to form a very thick batter. I initially used a whisk, but that was a mistake. Use a spoon. You should add salt at this point too, but I forgot and salted the fritters in the pan, which also worked. Mix in the peas.

Melt the butter in the pan. Use the spoon to drop globs of batter into the pan. The size and shape of the globs don't matter, but they should be about 1/2-inch thick and they shouldn't touch one another. Cook until the bottoms are golden-brown; the fritters should come away from the pan easily. Flip and cook the other side to the same doneness (or however you want it, obviously). Grind some pepper over the fritters and serve!

the verdict: Delicious. But more filling than I expected. This turned out to be a substantial lunch rather than a light snack.

"A company of us got together once, and we drank a bit, it's true, and suddenly somebody suggested that each of us, without leaving the table, tell something about himself, but something that he himself, in good conscience, considered the worst of all the bad things he'd done in the course of his whole life; and that it should be frank, above all, that it should be frank, no lying!"

"A strange notion!" said the general.

"Strange as could be, Your Excellency, but that's what was good about it."

"A ridiculous idea," said Totsky, "though understandable: a peculiar sort of boasting." ...

"And was it a success?" asked Nastasya Filippovna.

"The fact is that it wasn't, it turned out badly, people actually told all sorts of things, many told the truth, and, imagine, many even enjoyed the telling, but then they all felt ashamed, they couldn't stand it! On the whole, though, it was quite amusing--in its own way, that is."

"But that would be really nice!" observed Nastasya Filippovna, suddenly quite animated. "Really, why don't we try it, gentlemen! In fact, we're not very cheerful. If each of us agreed to tell something... of that sort... naturally, if one agrees, because it's totally voluntary, eh? Maybe we can stand it? At least it's terribly original...."
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volonkhosky

I note that playing the Dostoevsky Drinking Game with the scene which follows will get you so terrifically smashed that you can see into your own soul.

THIS SUNDAY AT 4.30, the National Gallery of Art is showing Alain Cavalier's Therese, a St. T. biopic I raved about here. (Or if you'd rather know why Cavalier should make a werewolf movie, click here!)

POKER FACE: So various recent events, including but not limited to the bizarre Elena Kagan media mishegoss*, have led me to think about coming out/being out, and why my experiences cause me to think it's usually the best policy. Insert all the obvious disclaimers (I realize that I'm not you, I don't believe in advice columns, my family is supportive and my career would've been bizarre anyway, I have no religious superiors to answer to other than God, etc), but here are, at least, some things to think about.

[*ETA: Argh, just so no one can misread me: Nothing in this post is a defense of others' interest in Kagan's boudoir. Nor do I have--nor do I want!--any information about said boudoir. It's more that the kerfuffle about her, in conjunction with several other events which would take even more time and disclaimers to cover, prompted various thoughts. And now back to our show.]

I read somewhere a really intense description, which is echoed to a certain extent in Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, of one way being gay may affect your perceptions: Because you're forced into extreme vigilance over your responses to sensuality, you become hyperaware of sensual realities. I don't know that this is true for everyone, obviously, but it does resonate with me. And this hyperawareness, while often unpleasant or humiliating, can also conduce to both artistic accomplishment and Catholic faith.

But there's a different kind of hyperawareness which is provoked by the closet: strict and deliberate control of one's speech. And this kind of control and self-consciousness destroys sprezzatura in conversation and prompts instead a really fearful, "only say what you're certain won't be understood," blandly conformist way of talking and writing.

The closet also offers a lot of temptations to sin; I'd say for many people it just is a near occasion of sin. There's the obvious temptation to lie. There's the temptation to throw other people under the bus to make yourself look more hetero, or butcher or whatever. There's the temptation to deny or speak uncharitably to openly gay friends (or, for that matter, enemies). There's the temptation to cut yourself off from other people so they don't get too close--to avoid friendship, and avoid help. Being in the closet makes it harder to act rightly. To the extent that being out involves humiliation and lost opportunities (although it is also extraordinarily freeing and opens a lot of doors you may not have realized existed) I would say that sometimes you have to journey through what Spenser called "the Gracious Valley of Humiliation."

Many of these same beneficial effects of being openly gay come with being "out" as celibate-for-religious-reasons also. You also avoid giving scandal. I personally find celibacy a more embarrassing confession than lovely old lesbianism, but obviously that is just all the more reason to be open about it!

So again, in any individual case I can't tell you what to do, but I think it's worth defending choices which may make your life harder, or close off some opportunities you really want, but which also make your speech and life vastly more interesting and more likely to be virtuous.

(Also! I resent Lady Gaga as much as any right-thinking child of the '80s, but you really, really should click that link in the post title. It's not as amazing as this, but then, what is?)

AT MARRIAGEDEBATE NOW: interracial marriage rates, "Come for the pizza, stay for the deconstruction of masculinity," how pregnancy is viewed in Israel vs. Japan, surrogacy laws may change in India, and more.

FASCINATING STUFF. The commenters offer a few more possible explanations, including at least one in which the causal arrow runs the other way.

DEPLOYING ONE HORROR TO EXCUSE ANOTHER. Or, how Holocaust survivors are now being branded Soviet war criminals. Via Mark Oppenheimer.

"CRADLE WILL ROCK": My column for Inside Catholic; it's about cradle Catholics and how they can be awesome.

FROM NOW ON I WILL LISTEN TO MY FRIENDS WHEN THEY TELL ME I NEED TO HEAR SOMETHING.

NEW FAMILY SCHOLARS BLOG!

BE CAREFUL--TODAY MAY BE THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE: A post about how every sin is like a child.

[This post talks about other people. I'm 100% certain that no one, including both my best friend and the other people described, will be able to figure out what I'm talking about, which is the only reason I'm posting this. I've done a lot of awful stuff in public, because I'm awesome like that, so if you know me just assume that this post is about something worse than the thing you're thinking of.]

On Saturday I went with friends to revisit the National Gallery's “Sacred Made Real” exhibit (see below). It's a sufficiently intense exhibit that I couldn't take too much of it. So for a little while my friends were still in the dark monastic gallery rooms, studded with paintings and sculptures of God in agony, and I was standing in the big sunlit atrium staring out the window at an American boulevard. And I thought about you again.

You and I were friends once. Not for too long. The reasons we're not close now are partly your fault, partly mine, partly just the inevitable nexus of circumstance and personality and nobody's fault but the big pinball machine of life.

But I can still think of scenes, moments, in which I sinned—and I had no idea, at that time, that I was sinning against you and that these sins would form part of the barrier between us later on. I (hope I) would never have done those things if I had known.

The thing with sin is, you cannot control it. You birth your sin and send it out into the world and then it does whatever it wants, to whomever it wants to do it to. You aren't totally helpless (except when you are), just as parents aren't totally helpless except when they are. They can educate their children, and you can try to mitigate your sin. Sometimes you can make some kind of partial amends. (I am not sure I believe that any sins are fully amended in this life. I'm not sure I believe in any real temporal reconciliation.) Sometimes the relationship you damaged heals, and sometimes it's even “stronger in the broken places,” as I think Hemingway said, and that isn't to your credit but you still get to enjoy it. But a lot of the time there is no way to attempt amends without causing your victim further pain. I can think of at least one person (not the main person this post is about) to whom I desperately want to apologize, but I know that reestablishing contact would be more likely to hurt than to help, and the attempt would be more about my guilt than about the other person's pain. I still pray for that person, which is pretty much all I can do now.

You can have high expectations for your sin, as parents have aspirations for their children. In the most vivid moments in which I sinned against my friend, I sometimes expected that my sins would bring us closer together. But you don't control it. You don't get to choose. Sin is not a domino rally, where if you were just acutely insightful enough you could see the whole pattern and predict and direct the repercussions of knocking over that very first domino. Sin is a lit match thrown into a fireworks factory: Sometimes nothing too bad happens to the people you love (I mean, you know, other than Jesus). Sometimes something beautiful happens, as God chooses to make your sin a source of grace for you or for others. But sometimes the catastrophe occurs, chaos come again. And you don't get to guide your sin or make it do what you want it to do or keep it from doing what you most desperately want it to avoid.

Sin is your child, and you are as helpless as any parent. I read once a mother, quoting someone else, saying that your child is “your heart walking around outside your body.” Sin is everything that isn't your heart, or shouldn't be, walking around outside your body—and, once the deed is done, outside your will.

AESTHETICS ENCOMPASSES BUT DOES NOT EXCLUDE REASON: Or, like the ads say about the ACLU, everybody needs a natural-lawyer sometime.

"THE GLORY AND THE GRIME": My Commonweal review of the National Gallery of Art's exhibit of Spanish painting and painted sculpture (through May 31). The review is subscribers-only for now. I'll let you know if that changes. I will say that if you have any interest in e.g. Zurbaran, or the bloody-mindedness of Spanish Catholic art, you need to see this. It is shockingly emotional--I had to talk myself into moving around the sculptures so I could see the Virgin's face--and, as I argue in the CW piece, intensely stylized.

Every Christian in Washington, DC and its surroundings should go see this exhibit. I note that it features statues from "working churches"--I mean, last year some of these statues were paraded through the local streets during Lent. This is Christ as alarm clock, or cell-phone alarm: Wake up. There is something more than work which you need to do.

The exhibit is free. (Are you?)

A GIANT SQUID. THE COLD WAR. And Nietzsche!

Finally, the giant squid movie I deserve.

Via DLB.

Mrs. Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs. Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong.
--I feel like people have been trying to make me read Muriel Spark for years. This thing, quoted in Commonweal from Spark's novel Memento Mori, has finally succeeded.

I CAN'T LET THE CLOCK STRIKE MIDNIGHT without noting that this is the feast of St. Job. I spent it at the pregnancy center, where I will also spend the Feast of the Visitation, because every day is self-parody day!

BOSS LADY. Maggie Gallagher has a column on the whole red vs. blue families shtik. I generally think she's better in books than in columns, but this one is really good, assuming she's right about the numbers. More soonish.

SAVE IT FOR THE MORNING AFTER. Immediate thoughts on Iron Man 2. Maybe more when I see it again. Abundant spoilers!

If you make God bleed, then people will not believe in him.
--the least scientifically-accurate line from Iron Man 2. Spoken by a Russian, no less!

PHILOSOPHY WORKS IN PRACTICE, BUT NOT IN THEORY is my basic response to this discussion of "Great Books" propaganda. In theory yes, Great Booksiness is cultural relativism in cultural conservative wool. In practice, if you have a nexus of friendships and a structure for leadership, you can come to understand philosophy as eros, the self-changing love of truth. It's a practice which requires humility and desire and the longing for the glimpsed but (for an atheist) unnamed Beloved.

I still think this is the best way to understand me and how I think and what I care about. This and maybe even this might also be relevant.

I'm thinking a lot, right now, about the fact that philosophy requires both heightened arrogance and heightened humility. On the one hand you have to be willing to spout off about everything! You have to be willing to talk about subjects in which you have all the expertise of a journalist, i.e. a professional dilettante. If you won't argue about subjects beyond your knowledge, you can't lead and you can't grow. But at the same time you need to be radically aware of your own incapacities, willing to be utterly reshaped by other people and their descriptions of their experiences and the conclusions they draw from that experience. I don't have any especial formula for resolving this dilemma; I just think it's important that philosophers understand that their practice has spiritual downsides of pride and vanity as well as the perhaps more obvious spiritual upside of Socratean "I know nothing" humility.

I very much welcome you all's comments since I have no idea how to formulate general advice here, and while I accept that maybe there is no general advice to give, I'd still like a sense of how actual humans who aren't me attempt to negotiate the arrogance/humility aspect of philosophy.

Original link via PES.

HOW IS JONATHAN RAUCH SO AWESOME? I mean, yeah, this isn't the column I would write about Red Families vs. Blue Families, but it is still so much more focused on the most important issues than approximately 99% of the reviews/articles/responses I've read so far, and so completely free from pharisaism . When I went to see him talk about his gay-marriage book he was totally self-overhearing, too, which as you know is one of my absolute most admired traits in any person. It's just so refreshing to see someone actively avoid opportunities to "charge them for it."

HELL IS FOR CHILDREN: Because my life is one giant roulette wheel and I am the shiny ball, I decided to start my Eastertide by reading a 500-page Hungarian Holocaust novel.

Janos Nyiri's Battlefields and Playgrounds is one of the best novels I've read in a long time.

Personal digression, included because it might be of interest, but skip this if you want to know about why the book is so powerful: I admit that I actually haven't read that much about the Holocaust. I've read both of my grandfather's books (The Uses of Adversity, and also The Pavement of Hell which I recommend highly--and WHOA, Amazon says there's one about the Warsaw Uprising, which I need and am ordering RIGHT NOW) and a few other things e.g. Maus and Jane Yolen's novel Briar Rose. But I have the impression, which could be wrong, that when I was growing up there was a concerted movement within American Jewry to move away from focusing on the Holocaust--a sense that Jews needed to ensure that their children didn't see Judaism as defined by attempted genocide. So while I felt really strong personal connections to the depictions of Jewish life in e.g. Stories My Grandfather Should Have Told Me or The Power of Light, I didn't seek out Holocaust narratives or feel especially connected to them. I didn't think about which of the neighbors I could trust to hide me. I'm conflicted about whether that's the best way to address the Holocaust for Jewish children; hatred of the Jews is intense and horrific and longstanding enough that I do think you don't really understand Jewish life unless you acknowledge it, but at the same time obviously Judaism is not actually defined by other people's reactions to Jews, and the Book of Esther is not the only book. To the extent that this whole digression is relevant to Nyiri, it's just to say that I don't really know what's typical for a "Holocaust novel." All I know is that I've never read one like this.

The protagonist is a fierce, tough, batteringly self-assured little boy. Seriously, he calls his mother a whore! (Because she takes up with a Gentile after divorcing his father.) He is ferocious and completely convinced of the rightness of his own perspective. The child's-eye perspective felt completely real. Joszka is rarely able to view things from other people's perspectives. That protects him from much of the horror around him--but not all of it.

This is also a Holocaust novel where the actual devastation of the Jewish people takes place off-screen for almost the entire time. The hell-tide is creeping nearer and nearer to his family every moment, and the reader isn't allowed to forget that, but it isn't until very late in the novel that we even see one corpse, let alone a sense of the total devastation which the novel's denouement reveals.

In the final third or so of the novel theology finally rears its ugly head. There's an amazing chapter in which Joszka's profligate, almost entirely absent father (and presumably you can write your own theological parallels there) returns to talk with him about God, and argues that the Jewish way of relating to God differs from the Christian in that the Christian believes in total unconditional surrender. Thus Christianity is a slave morality, and Christians are psychologically trained to view the world in terms of slaves and masters. So they think they are God's slaves and the Jews are theirs. Judaism by contrast, he argues, is a wrestling with God and a treaty with Him. When God blesses the Jews, the Jews can trust Him enough to bless Him back. The novel's characters really vividly portray both the degree to which this is a true portrait of Christianity, and the degree to which this is a false portrait of Judaism. I was reminded of The Trial of God.

This book is amazingly compelling. It's actually fun to read for a long time, since even as the readers' dread never abates we're still mostly following Joszka's attempts to manipulate all the adults around him; and when it stops being fun, it starts being painfully suspenseful. I can't recommend this highly enough.

The notes at the end are in large part a compendium of Catholics Choosing Hell, so there's that, also.

THOUGH I PUT YOU ON A PEDESTAL, I PUT YOU ON THE PILL: Some thoughts about Neil LaBute, Reasons to Be Pretty. At the Studio Theater 'til May 16, I think, and this really is a good production with good acting, even though I'm gonna be pretty rough on the play itself.

Even with an amazing actor as Kent (Thom Miller, who's really fantastic and hilarious), LaBute's script is way too on-the-nose. I mean I get that your story is about a manchild becoming a very slightly more adult human man. You don't need the immediate within-scene contrast where Kent, the bad guy, stomps on Greg-the-Jesus-is-this-what-passes-for-a-good-guy's sports jersey and then accuses Greg of being childish.

There are real philosophical fights about what counts as childish, and that's maybe a part of why I'm so irritated by the cheap LaBute choices. I mean, rebellion against one's parents or culture can be presented as adulthood or as "I don't wanna!", and that's actually a really interesting clash. Sorting out the degree to which one's choices are reflections of, reactions against, or more complexly related to parental choices is also a really interesting character arc. (I KNOW HOW MUCH I'M PROJECTING, LEAVE ME ALONE!!!) But LaBute in this play chooses to ignore any and all parental influence (not how actual heterosexual relationships work, come on!) and treats his characters as deracinated individuals. No real love of home is ever presented, nor is rebellion against home. Characters are generic "Americans," not specific humans with specific parents and loves and habits.

I guess I'm especially displeased with the fact that LaBute sets up his play as a critique of, like, American gender pressures, but in fact this production ends up seeming to suggest that all of contemporary American neuroses around looks and gender and manhood are simply inevitable byproducts of heterosexuality. Which, like, I'm the first to say that straight people are the Problem and heterosexuality is inherently difficult, but anyone with imagination should be able to suggest that culture isn't monolithic and we might at least replace our contemporary neuroses with different ones. I don't know. I'd really love to know what actual straight people think of this play or this production, because it felt so intensely alien to me.

This isn't a play about becoming a man. This is a play about knuckling under to the status quo--even the humiliations are only the ones which would make the audience feel the ultimate normative, boring masculinity of the hero. I guess that's what I really hated, since I think men can be kind of awesome, in the right lighting.

A MAN'S CASTLE IS HIS HOME! Building the modern medieval fortress in France; and in the Ozarks.

Links via the Rattus.

P IS FOR PUS. Saint Catherine of Siena drank pus!

Among other things she did.

EVERYBODY GOES HOME IN THE END.

"The only thing worse than losing this war would be to win it. God has saved us from that."
--Torma the teacher, in Janos Nyiri, Battlefields and Playgrounds, tr. Nyiri and William Brandon

LORD GOD HAVE MERCY--ALL CRIMES ARE PAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIID!!!! On Saturday the Rattus and I went to New Britain, CT, to see the Hole in the Wall Theater's punk-themed production of Richard III. I was expecting cheap thrills, something a bit chintzy but still fun.

And sure, okay, some of the acting was wobbly. But mostly this was super extra awesome! And smart, too--there were genuine insights and smart choices here. I feel like I understand the play better now, plus it was so much fun that I almost exploded. I really wish I'd seen it earlier--we went to the very last performance. I'll definitely be checking out what this theater is doing the next time I'm in sunny New Haven.

So some thoughts: First, the punk theme isn't quite consistent or really very thematic at all! That's fine--I don't think a one-to-one, "everyone is corrupt and their level of punkosity signals their level of corruption" thing would work, nor would a more explicitly '70s Britain "winter of our discontent," nor would a "Richard III is the story of England going crazy" thing. Instead, the punk theme was basically an excuse for lots of hilarious and terrific visuals. I mean, if you don't love Richard of Gloucester spray-painting an anarchy sign on a wall, you basically hate freedom.

The Richard was fantastic: Nick Pollifrone, who trained at RADA. He's having an immense amount of fun, and he sells the various choices about when to yell and when to slink. The seduction of Anne is hard to mess up, but this guy was even able to handle the really clunky "Richard is Richard; that is, I am I" speech--he spends the first half of it reflexively sarcastic, self-lacerating and self-ignoring, and then slowly becomes completely unhinged.

The cross-gender casting was also really well done. Catesby (Amanda Ratti) was a groupie-ish girlfriend type, violent and lost; Ratcliffe (Katie Corbett) was a dead-eyed and intermittently thuggish blonde (throughout her first scene she did this terrific, drugged-out stare, with slow, mindless blinks every ten seconds or so); and Hastings (Barbara Gallow) was an older feline. All of Richard's minions captured the variety of motives you need to explain how he hung on to anybody after he started killing off his supporters. Buckingham (Ed Bernstein) is naively ambitious and a bit flighty; Hastings is overconfident in her own abilities, especially her ability to read other people; and Catesby and Ratcliffe are in it for fun, for a nihilistic, ecstatic anti-joy.

Richmond (Kenneth Semerato) was a sleek corporatist. Both he and Richard play their "rally the troops" speeches as rallying the audience, which I expect is a normal interpretation even though I don't recall ever having seen before, and which totally took advantage of the tiny theater space. The fight in which Richard is killed was furiously physical, and there's a nice, nice moment when Richmond limps away, echoing Richard's own limp. (Also, most of the Battle of Bosworth Field is scored to my actual favorite Sex Pistols song, "Sub * Mission," with some very cool choices in pairing action with song. In general the song choices here were absolutely stellar--Ratty pointed out that this was clearly a labor of love.)

The production notes were hilariously in the tank for the historical Richard. There was even an ad! YORKISTS 4EVA.

So yeah: I'm really just posting this to tell you to keep an eye out for Hole in the Wall if you're in the area. The Rat and I were surprised and thrilled.

J. JONAH JAMESON IS ON TWITTER. Bless his old husk of a heart!

IT'S 4/20. Go to church!